What We Take For Granted

Yesterday at about 1pm or so, we discovered that we didn’t have any water!  There wasn’t a scheduled outage and the bills are all up to date, so we were like WTF!

It’s amazing how much we take having water at our fingertips for granted!  We have three toilets in this house.  That meant that for the duration of the outage, each toilet could only be flushed once.  That meant we each got one poop with one toilet to spare.  That meant that any pee trips meant the pee had to stay in the toilet.  This thoroughly disgusts me.  Abundant water is one of the joys of living in Canada.  I was not impressed when I couldn’t flush my damn toilets.

Sure, I’m all for conservation of water and we aren’t overly wasteful people to begin with.  I shut the tap off while I brush my teeth and we take showers, and I only run a full dishwasher and do do full loads of laundry, etc.  But when I poop or pee, I WANT IT GONE! I HAVE TO FLUSH!

I don’t know how many times I absentmindedly turned the water on to wash my hands only to find none there.  I also squirt soap on my hands first and then turn on the water, so I ended up with soapy hands and had to wipe them on a dry cloth.

Tony got the runaround from the city and water people and they didn’t know what was going on so we left the house and took Giggs for a walk and to the dog park, and then we went for coffee.  We got home around dinner time and still no water.

At 7pm I went to yoga.  I came home at 8:30 and… no water.  We managed to find out that our entire row of seven townhouses is without water while the other 25 are fine.  Great.  Maybe the neighbours will let me poop and shower at their place.  Also, by this point, we’re out of drinking water.  I had big plans for a relaxing bath whilst eating strawberries and I was getting pissed off.

Luckily, our good friend is a plumber and Tony decided to take matters into his own hands.  He called him over and they managed to get a key into the plumbing room place.  What did they discover?  Well, it looks like the landscapers had been in there earlier in the day and shut the irrigation lines off (because when the boys turned them back on, there was a spot that was in need of repair and flooding, or something) and they also managed to shut off the water main to our building for good measure.  Then they left.  So helpful.

Anyway, in the end, I got to run around and delightfully flush all the toilets and that made me very happy.  Then I got to wash my strawberries and settle in to a nice hot bath at about 9pm.  Tony and our plumber friend hung out and drank beer to celebrate their manliness.  I feel the urge to go scrub toilets, just for good measure.